Biden’s Title IX guidance on the ropes

Twenty-six states have filed at least seven lawsuits against the Biden administration’s pro-LGBTQ education policy. So far, they have won two court decisions.

In the past two weeks, two U.S. district judges blocked the Department of Education’s new Title IX rules that would require schools to consider sexual orientation and gender identity as protected from discrimination. The rulings apply to 10 states.

“This is a big victory for women and girls because the Title IX revisions being pushed by the Biden administration would have ended sex-based protections for biological women in locker rooms, bathrooms, sports, and elsewhere, plain and simple,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement. “This is a retreat from the progress women have made.”

In the first ruling, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction to restrict enforcement of the changes in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Montana.

“The text of Title IX confirms that Title IX was intended to prevent biological women from being discriminated against in education in favor of biological men,” Doughty wrote.

Then on Monday, U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves granted another preliminary injunction in a similar case for six more states: Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. In his ruling, Reeves called the new regulation “arbitrary in the truest sense of the word.”

“If the new rule is allowed to take effect on August 1, 2024, all plaintiffs will suffer immediate and irreparable harm,” Reeves wrote.

Alliance Defending Freedom filed a motion to join the suit against the Title IX changes as intervenor-plaintiffs. The motion allowed ADF to represent two clients affected by those changes, track athlete Adaleia Cross and a professional association called Christian Educators.

Cross, now in high school in West Virginia, was forced, beginning in seventh grade, to share locker room space with a boy who identified as female. The next year, she said, he began to verbally harass her. The student, who goes by BPJ, began identifying as a girl in the third grade and is on puberty blockers. BPJ replaced Cross in a competition, benefiting from his heightened physical abilities, Cross wrote in an opinion article for Fox News.

“It’s 2024, and I thought things were equal for women — that if I tried my best, I had a fair chance,” Cross wrote.

Aaron Baer, president of the Ohio Center for Christian Virtue, said the federal government should withhold funding from schools that make girls compete against boys.

“On the one hand, it’s great that now we don’t have this additional pressure from the federal government coming in,” Baer said of the court rulings. “But on the other hand, we still have a long fight here in court that we feel confident we’re going to win. But it just shows all the attacks that girls are under today.”

ADF also represented Christian Educators, a California-based association for Christian teachers nationwide. The new standards “create a chilling effect on free speech that violates the First Amendment rights of educators at schools bound by Title IX,” the organization said in a statement.

While Title IX offers some exemptions for religious schools, Rouleau said those provisions are insufficient. She argued educators in religious and nonreligious schools must have freedom of speech on the issue of gender identity.

“No educator should be forced to say untrue things that violate their conscience to keep their job,” Christian Educators executive director David Schmus said.

The Biden administration is expected to appeal both injunctions.